


no toil, no danger

by thchateaus



Category: The Last of Us
Genre: Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Grief/Mourning, there was only one boat, tryna be vague here bc spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:54:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24852682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thchateaus/pseuds/thchateaus
Summary: TLOU 2 SPOILERS.Abby doesn't leave alone.
Relationships: past dina/ellie (the last of us)
Comments: 16
Kudos: 207





	no toil, no danger

**Author's Note:**

> ok hello so. that ending really got me sad as fuck and i don't know what this is. it has a very open ending. i just wished these two characters had actually had some conversation, in that scene most of all. is this ooc? probably. did i just write it at 4am? maybe. does it make sense? probably not. but i wanted to write something.
> 
> Also, the finger thing doesn't happen cause i say so.

She’s so fucking tired.

It's bone-deep and suffocating. Her chest seizes with every increased second her hands squeeze around her throat.

She’s thought of this every night. It's all that she’s thought about. Watching her die.

She thought she’d feel something. That it would heal that never ending ache that nothing can fix, stem the anger that’s taken hold of her. Leah’s death did nothing. Nola. Owen. The pregnant woman, either. It just made her feel worse. Angrier. Number.

She feels nothing as Abby struggles beneath the surface, as her nails scrape at her skin and the blood crusted on it. Her own, Abby’s, the dozen guys back there that she blew to pieces.

She’s just tired.

Joel would be so disappointed at what she’d become. What she’d let poison her. The amount of people she’d killed just to get here, just to feel absolutely fucking nothing but guilt.

What has she become?

As Abby stares up at her with pleading eyes, she feels bile climb her throat. She can’t do it. She’s a coward.

She lets Abby go.

She falls back into the water, cold enough tremors rip through her, and heaves with her head between her knees.

“Just take him,” She gets out, throat constricting on nothing and mouth brimming with her own blood.

Ellie can hear Abby gasping as she treads through the waves. Coughing something brutal and broken. When she looks up, it's to Abby crying with her hand on Lev’s shoulder, and she feels like the worst person in the world. 

She wonders, briefly, if this is how Marlene felt before Joel put a bullet in her skull.

Did she feel any remorse at all for what was about to happen? Did she still believe she was doing the right thing as she lay there in a pool of her own blood? At least Ellie’s death would mean something. It would’ve mattered and she would have saved people. Wouldn’t have become whatever the fuck kind of shell she was now.

Joel would barely recognise her, would he? That whole journey, the hospital and getting to Jackson, all of it. It was for nothing. She wished, for a moment, that they were back out there on the road. That she could thank him a little more for protecting her, fucking hug him more, maybe.

Had he been comforted then, when he saw her? Did he finally feel at peace, dying with her there? 

Or had she made it all worse?

Whatever. Too late fucking late. No use debating over ghosts. Not when she was practically one herself now. She’s made of them. Their faces. Those she’s killed and his. Always his. She can barely remember half of them, but his? Crystal fucking clear.

So much blood on her hands it felt permanently etched there in the grooves of her palms, the bud of her nails, and she still felt no different to that day. Just numb.

She watches as Abby speaks softly to Lev as she unties the rope from the rotted post. She can see her trembling from here. The waves lap at Ellie’s stomach at that moment and she hisses, her wound biting and raw.

Abby turns to her, throat red and face befallen. She steps forward hesitantly and Ellie doesn’t have the energy to fight again even if she wanted to. She lets her eyes slip shut as Abby comes toward her, anticipates what her finishing blow will be. Whatever it is, she deserves it.

A hand rests on her shoulder, trembling and dripping.

“Come with us.”

Ellie almost laughs, shakes her head as she looks up at her. Abby’s frowning down at her, still hovering. She’s serious. Ellie shrugs off her hand.

“Why?”

Abby looks away for a moment, back to the crosses barely sticking out in the fog. She blinks away tears, wipes at them with bloodied, dirty hands. “I don’t know. I can’t just leave you here.”

“Nah, you should. Just get it over with,” Ellie chews at her lip, throat tight, “I deserve it."

“I’m not gonna do that,” Abby sighs. She looks out to where the fog is strongest, and Ellie does the same.

“Fuck you,” Ellie spits blood in the water, “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? I’m giving you a free pass, here. Do I have to fucking _beg_ you?”

She can see her toy with her hands through the corner of her vision, they’re still shaking, they’re still bloodied. She’s not sure who’s with.

“It's not what I want,” Abby mutters, exhausted and weary, nothing like the woman back in that lodge with a club in hand. “I’m done. With all of this. I don’t want to kill you.”

“Yeah, well, you’re a coward,” Ellie hisses, feels really damn pathetic when she chokes on a lump.

“Maybe,” Abby sniffles, hoarse, and Ellie hates that she can’t hate her.

“Why didn’t you kill me,” Abby almost phrases it like a sentence. She clears her throat, coughs a little before lowering herself into the water beside Ellie with a grunt. “Why’d you stop?”

Ellie inhales ocean spray, and thinks of the time Joel showed her that shitty little wreck of a boat on their way to Jackson. It brings a smile to her face, somehow, and she finally lets herself release. Lets out a cry, a pathetic thing, and scrubs a hand over her face.

“Joel,” She whispers quietly, the ocean an echo chamber. She can’t trust herself to actually speak without sobbing. The tears escape anyway, she can’t fucking stop them, and she doesn’t try to. Abby stiffens against her shoulder.

Abby stutters through a breath, a broken thing, and Ellie listens to her shaky wheezes that come and go. She wonders if it's because of her or because of that pillar. “I thought it’d make the pain stop. But it's just.. it's just _worse_. It's so much worse.”

“I don’t give a fuck,” She can’t bring herself to think about that. Can’t stop thinking about that day either. She’d treated him like absolute shit, for _months_ , and he still died loving her. He’d reached for her before that last blow. 

“Okay,” She watches Abby pick at the blood crusting high on her cheek until fresh crimson beads in its place, tracking her face.

“What’d they do to you?” She asks, and Abby’s laughter is a hoarse, ugly thing.

Abby gives a vague gesture, another empty laugh, and Ellie’s gaze is drawn to the blistered lesions of her wrists.

“It’d be shorter to say what they didn’t do.”

“I saw what they did, with the clickers and shit,” She’s pretty sure that she actually believes it when she hears herself say it. “I hope the kid’s okay.”

“He will be. I’ll make sure of it.”

“He doesn’t deserve this.”

“It's my fault. I dragged him along, I put him through all of this shit and for what? It wasn’t fucking worth it, _none_ of it.”

The blood beading on her cheek trickles down her face and Ellie frowns as Abby absentmindedly thumbs it away, face vacant. 

“All I’ve thought about is you for months,” Ellie sighs, watches her wipe the blood on her knee. “I couldn’t stop, even when I was supposed to be happy. Supposed to get over it. I'd built something.. something good. But I lost everything because of you. How the fuck could I move on?”

“Yeah, well, you’re not exactly innocent, are you? Can you even remember how many people you’ve killed to get to me? You just took down that whole place up there,” Abby’s lips press into a thin line. She exhales shakily. “Doesn’t matter now, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Ellie blinks. Drops her hands back to her calves in the water.

Abby watches her for a while, quiet wheezes the only indication she’s still there, before she extends an open palm between them, “Ellie, just come with us. Before they find us both.”

Ellie’s starting to shake with the cold.

“I just tried to kill you.”

“I probably deserved it,” Abby purses her lips, they’re cracked and bitten into. “Look, come with us and you can do whatever you want after. You can ditch us. Put that knife through my throat. I just - I can’t just leave Lev, and I can’t leave you here to die. Not after everything I did. I can’t.”

Ellie presses into the wound on her stomach, fresh blood soaking into her tank. The stitches must’ve opened back up with everything. Fuck, she hadn’t even noticed.

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know,” Abby grunts in pain as she stands, blood beading on her cheek again. “I got in contact with a group of fireflies right before these assholes found us. I was thinking of heading there, maybe, I don’t know. I just gotta find him somewhere safe.”

Ellie‘s eyes are drawn to the marks around Abby’s wrists again. Lev must have the same, she thinks, and wonders just how long he must’ve been there before Abby for him to nearly pass out like that. What the hell he’d just endured.

They left a kid to die slow as can be on a cross _._

She heaves out a sigh and stands too.

“Fine.”

“Okay,” Abby nods, slow, “Are you… are you coming?”

“Whatever,” She trails Abby the short distance to the boat, switchblade burning a hole in her pocket.

Abby clambers in first, tucking worn tarp over Lev, before reaching her hand out to Ellie again. She falters. This is her last chance.

“Oh my God, your stomach,” Abby winces, "Jesus _,_ I’m sorry.”

“I have gauze in my bag,” She says on autopilot, blinks right out of it and meets sympathetic eyes. Tired eyes.

She takes her hand and climbs in, mindful of the wound. It begins to sting almost immediately after getting out of the water, the adrenaline numbing off. A rip of a bandaid.

“Fuck,” She gasps, presses her palm to it as blood oozes out. “Fuck, I don’t-”

“It's okay,” Abby pulls the lead for the engine and once it whirs to life, grabs for the strap of Ellie’s bag.

“What-”

“Can you keep a hold of the motor? I can try and tourniquet it for now if you get us the fuck out of here. Can you do that?”

“Yeah, I can do that,” She lifts her arm to pull off her backpack, hisses at the pain that shoots through her. “Just - just give me a fucking second.”

“Here,” Abby lets go of the motor for the zip tie on her bag, pulls it open herself and reaches inside. Her mouth twists when she spots what must be Joel’s jacket.

She pulls out a couple packs of gauze and gestures shakily with it, “Can you, uh. Your bag.”

“Oh,” Ellie nods, lifts the backpack to her shoulder again and pulls up her tank gingerly. 

Abby shuffles closer, still a fair distance from Ellie, and dabs delicately at the wound.

“Looks painful,” She comments, as if her body isn’t a mismatch of cuts and bruises and burns.

Today’s been a weird fucking day.

“No shit.”

She shakes it off and yanks at the motor again. 

Abby’s silent, focused on ridding of the blood she spilled, and warm. The waves that lap at the boat lull her into a state of calm, and she finds with every blink it's harder to open her eyes.

“Rest,” Abby stops blotting at the wound and pulls out another gauze pack. “I’ll steer.”

Ellie scoffs, half-assed, and Abby swallows.

“What?”

“Why the fuck are you being nice to me?”

“Why’d you let me go?” Abby shrugs, unravels bright cloth, “Sit forward.”

“No, no, I just,” She complies, Abby sitting back on her thighs to get both her hands around her torso and wrap the cloth around it. “I don’t get it.”

She looks up as Abby’s lips purse as she ponders it. She smiles, weak, and ties off the makeshift bandage. “I’m trying to figure out why myself.”

Ellie laughs, brisk, can’t help herself. This whole thing was fucking insane. Maybe she was.

Abby’s mouth twitches.

“Ellie, this whole thing, I’m done. Maybe… maybe I can’t do anything about the shit I did to you or your people. I can’t forgive myself, I definitely can’t forgive you. But I can, um, I can do this. I can help you. And we'll never see each other again.”

“Alright,” Ellie sighs, gauze uncomfortable on the open wound. “I’ll steer.”

* * *

The shore where the yacht is, when they reach it, is surprisingly calm.

The rattlers’ territory burns in the distance. The smoke is still visible a couple miles out. 

Good.

**Author's Note:**

> currently found screaming about abby on tumblr @ valyriaas.


End file.
